Wilderness Graphical Update

Lots of interesting stuff going on over at Runescape. They've put up the newest batch of Readers' Letters, Pure Essence is now craftable on free servers, and they have also given us the Wildreness Graphical Update and some info on that. To read more on Runescape, click here.

Wilderness Update

We are continuing to improve the graphical look of our older areas of map to bring them up to the same standards as the new areas we've been developing. This week we've updated the graphics throughout the Wilderness, so if you're feeling particularly brave, check out the new lava areas, castles and an extremely fiery volcano.

To help you get around all of this, we've also introduced some new teleportation portals. The portals act as a new way of travelling around the Wilderness, but be careful: Once they're activated, there will be a short pause after which everyone in the immediate area will be transported to another portal, so don't rely on them to get you out of trouble. You may find that trouble follows you through... and you might end up in a higher level of Wilderness!

Battle Tortoises

The ingenious gnomes are continuing to come up with new ways to battle the Khazard troops. Now they've started breeding battle tortoises at the Stronghold. These armoured tanks, mounted by gnomic magi and rangers, are sure to be quite a challenge for General Khazard and his troops. They've already trundled some of them out onto the battlefield south-west of Ardougne.

Adjustments to Pest Control

We've made some adjustments to the Pest Control minigame we released last week.

Firstly, the game has been encountering issues where people turned up at the island with no intentions of helping to win, but just to stand around and get the rewards due to the efforts of their teammates. This is clearly not in the spirit of the game, therefore you now need to have dealt at least 50 points of damage over the course of a game to get a reward.

Secondly, we've put in a level 40 combat requirement to board the lander and play the game. Each player in a game of Pest Control increases the number of monsters in the game. As a lot of the monsters are pretty tough, this meant that it was extremely hard for lower level players to contribute enough to the team effort to make up for the added difficulty their presence had created.

We've also made it so that if more than 25 people board the lander, the people left behind will be given priority in being transported to the island on the next game.

We are planning some more changes, most significantly the ability to spend your Void Knight Commendation points on a greater variety of things than just combat xp. Taking a cue from the popularity of decorative armour from Castlewars, we are planning to make it so that you can earn that cool looking equipment you may have seen the Void Knights wearing.

If you're wondering about the Wilderness Tag minigame we mentioned in the monthly Behind the Scenes announcement, we've put that on hold for the moment. We felt that it could do with adjustments to make it enjoyable enough to meet your high standards.